Action, Operation, Gesture: Technology as Interdisciplinary Anthropology

• Applicant: Dr. Johannes Schick
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy ; Practical Philosophy
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 334136913

This project aims to provide a philosophical history of the concepts action, operation and gesture in order to re-evaluate the current debate on the relations of nature, culture and technology. The relation of human beings to their environment is essentially mediated through bodily, instrumental and mechanical techniques. These processes of mediation are the systematic focal point of this investigation, which takes the techno-anthropological moment of French anthropology as its point of departure: the homo faber-debate. In recourse to Mauss' assumption that the body is the first technical instrument, the perspective in the French tradition of technoanthropology has shifted to the question of how human gestures are crystallised in technical objects and how operational chains are constituted. Artefacts, tools and technical objects shall be made accessible and understandable in retrieving the human gestures contained within them. This method is remarkable, since it relies on an epistemology and ontology that is controversially discussed in the contemporary social and cultural sciences. Its philosophical history is, however, insufficiently researched. The controversy goes back to the origins of the modern social sciences, ignited when Bergson introduced the concept of homo faber. While Durkheim and his students explained the genesis of human reason in terms of the social, Bergson explained the genesis of reason in terms of the exchange of man with materiality: Humans create - by organizing, arranging and manipulating matter - material and intellectual tools. This project will therefore 1) reconstruct the homo faber-debate on the basis of the concepts action, operation and gesture, 2) describe the transformation of these concepts, as well as 3) elaborate on the modifications of the ontological presuppositions which are frequently implicit in the aforementioned conceptual transformations, so finding the conditions of possibility of an interdisciplinary anthropology. This provides the background for a newly developed perspective on the relation between technology and society: Human practices shall neither be reduced to an impersonal concept of agency, nor shall the recursive potential of technical networks within which human actions are executed be underestimated. This project is thus attempting to meet the claims of a Technology as Human Science in the tradition of Mauss and Haudricourt. This conception of technology shall be combined with the impetus of a technological humanism that can be found in Simondon's philosophy of technology, in order to develop an interdisciplinary anthropology that argues beyond the alternatives of technophobia and technophilia. The urgent questions of the relation of human beings to themselves and to their technical and non-technical environments can thus be re-addressed and up-dated.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants